Topic 46: Marriage
Tolstoy once wrote in a somewhat overrated novel dealing with, among other things, a marriage, that all families were happy in the same way but that each was miserable in their own unique fashion. I'd qualify this: nobody is married in the same way, happily or not. In my time, I have seen marriages of convenience, marriages of passion, and the union of Jack and Irina, which defies description. He never stopped referring to her as his wife, you know, and yet it startled me to hear Irina refer to him as her husband. We were on something of a race against the clock then, trying to assemble Il Dire, and I had just returned from Tibet and new revelations which I wasn't yet prepared to share. It was just a casual mention, perhaps more remarkable for the fact it occured at all, because as a rule we tried not to raise the subject of either Jack or Sydney, not after the first time in the air plane when she had commanded silence in her imperial way. But there it was. "My husband". She had spent perhaps seven years with him as Laura, and only a few hours each week for half a year when he knew her as Irina. Tired as I was then, somewhere on the brink between being emptied by Emily's death and grasping for that new revelation, fatherhood, I nearly said out loud this did not equate marriage in my mind, but stopped myself doing so just in time. After all, there was work to be done.
Besides, the woman you once had an affair with is the very last person to discuss marriage with, or your late wife.
Still. I dare say when Emily and I married we were in love like most young couples are, to give Tolstoy his due; what changed this passionate state of being entranced with each other into a marriage was not the exchange of vows as such but the decades we spent together. What made it a marriage was knowing each other at all times of the day and night, down to knowing by the noises we made when reading the newspaper what kind of article the other had just started. What made it a marriage was watching each other age and finding those signs of age so much a part of the other that we would not have traded them for our younger incarnations. What made it a marriage were the dark times, the lost child we never spoke of, the confession I made about my betrayal without naming a name and the way Emily received it, and the long fight against her cancer. What made it a marriage was the language we shared, and which we could not share with anyone else; allusions to a moment or a sensation gone since years and recalled with a word, or a look.
What made it a marriage was that in over thirty years, we did not leave each other. It probably would have been better for Emily if she had done. She tried, once, near the end. But I asked her to come with me again, and she did; only half an hour later I had her blood on my hands, springing from the wound a bullet had left that had been meant for me. This, too, then turned out to be marriage, to me: bringing death to the person I loved more than anyone else.
There is a custom, rapidly going out of fashion, about marriage rings. Widowers and widows wear the rings of their spouses as well as their own. When we faked Emily's death, not even a year before she did die, she had to leave her wedding ring with me. I took it as a pledge then, for our reunion once the Alliance had fallen. It was in fact her second ring; at one point during her cancer treatment, her fingers had swollen and her first ring had to be cut open. Later, I found out she had taken those two halfs, had gotten a goldsmith to melt them together again and had kept that first ring with her during those three months of secrecy and plotting. It was the one she wore then Dixon shot her. Later, Jack sent it to me, poste restante, to Switzerland, care of the Zurich central post office.
I'm wearing all three now. The first one she gave me, when we were young; it has never left my hand, and you can probably hardly read the inscription by now. Which is simply her name; Emily was not one for hallmark sentiments. The second one she gave me; new, and worn by her only for a few months. There are edges, and they cut into my flesh. And the one I gave her, broken, remelded, and, I fear, with an inscription, as sentimental as young men in love, or old men, for that matter, are ever going to get. After all, I never claimed Emily's virtues for myself.
These rings have been with me since she died, and they always will be.
This is what marriage means to me.
Besides, the woman you once had an affair with is the very last person to discuss marriage with, or your late wife.
Still. I dare say when Emily and I married we were in love like most young couples are, to give Tolstoy his due; what changed this passionate state of being entranced with each other into a marriage was not the exchange of vows as such but the decades we spent together. What made it a marriage was knowing each other at all times of the day and night, down to knowing by the noises we made when reading the newspaper what kind of article the other had just started. What made it a marriage was watching each other age and finding those signs of age so much a part of the other that we would not have traded them for our younger incarnations. What made it a marriage were the dark times, the lost child we never spoke of, the confession I made about my betrayal without naming a name and the way Emily received it, and the long fight against her cancer. What made it a marriage was the language we shared, and which we could not share with anyone else; allusions to a moment or a sensation gone since years and recalled with a word, or a look.
What made it a marriage was that in over thirty years, we did not leave each other. It probably would have been better for Emily if she had done. She tried, once, near the end. But I asked her to come with me again, and she did; only half an hour later I had her blood on my hands, springing from the wound a bullet had left that had been meant for me. This, too, then turned out to be marriage, to me: bringing death to the person I loved more than anyone else.
There is a custom, rapidly going out of fashion, about marriage rings. Widowers and widows wear the rings of their spouses as well as their own. When we faked Emily's death, not even a year before she did die, she had to leave her wedding ring with me. I took it as a pledge then, for our reunion once the Alliance had fallen. It was in fact her second ring; at one point during her cancer treatment, her fingers had swollen and her first ring had to be cut open. Later, I found out she had taken those two halfs, had gotten a goldsmith to melt them together again and had kept that first ring with her during those three months of secrecy and plotting. It was the one she wore then Dixon shot her. Later, Jack sent it to me, poste restante, to Switzerland, care of the Zurich central post office.
I'm wearing all three now. The first one she gave me, when we were young; it has never left my hand, and you can probably hardly read the inscription by now. Which is simply her name; Emily was not one for hallmark sentiments. The second one she gave me; new, and worn by her only for a few months. There are edges, and they cut into my flesh. And the one I gave her, broken, remelded, and, I fear, with an inscription, as sentimental as young men in love, or old men, for that matter, are ever going to get. After all, I never claimed Emily's virtues for myself.
These rings have been with me since she died, and they always will be.
This is what marriage means to me.